Get Your Vote ON!!!!

The Center for Growing People (Our Saviour Community Gardens) needs your votes! They are one of 15 community gardens across America in line to receive a shared sum of $20,000 from DeLoach. The 5 gardens who receive the most votes win! You can vote ONCE PER DAY from now until August 1, 2011 - and the winners will be announced in the October/November issue of Organic Gardening!

The Center for Growing People hopes to build fully accessible pathways and beds for gardeners with disabilities - who can say no to that!

Watch their video here (its the second to last one) and cast your vote!

'The Center for Growing People is a community gardening training project of the Dallas Urban Gardening Initiative (DUG IN) in partnership with Heifer International

This center, located on the grounds of Our Saviour Episcopal Church encompasses indoor classroom space, an outdoor teaching pavilion/water catchment structure, fruit orchards and vineyard, composting center, individual plots for families (Plot Against Hunger), and a community operated farm for food pantry production (Just Greens).

This project began in 2003 with an initial group of 20 plots for families and a small pantry plot. Two years later, from 2005, the major support for this training center came through a multi-year partnership with Heifer International. With Heifer’s support the fruit orchard and vineyard were established, regular workshops and trainings have benefited hundreds of people, animals including earthworms (vermiculture), bees, and chickens were added to compliment gardening activities, and donations of fresh produce to the needy have exceeded 7,000 pounds per year.

The Center for Growing People is the only facility of its kind in North Texas, and currently GICD (Gardners In Community Development) is able to provide training through hands-on and volunteer opportunities to other neighborhoods, churches, organizations and individuals that need a model to follow, want organizational training, and are in the process of starting and learning to maintain sustainable community food projects.

Most of GICD’s work is done by volunteers. These wonderful people help tend the grounds, they plant, weed and harvest the pantry plots, they help teach those who come to the center, and many serve by going out and helping when other neighborhoods begin projects. This is a labor of love for gardening, for the earth, and for each other.' - GICD website